Nitrous oxide – no laughing matter for forests

This is getting serious. Climate change could cause forests in Europe to spew out more and more nitrous oxide, aka laughing gas, a potent contributor to global warming.

As a greenhouse gas, N2O is 296 times as powerful as carbon dioxide and accounts for 6 per cent of the greenhouse effect. To better understand the N2O output from forests, Klaus Butterbach-Bahl of the Karlsruhe Research Centre in Germany and team members Per Ambus and Sophie Zechmeister-Boltenstern studied N2O emissions from 11 European forests (Biogeosciences, vol 3, p 135).

They found that nitrifying soil …

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